“The Object, Between Transcedental Phenomenology and Empiricist Realism”

Abstract

Abstract If in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft the transcendental conditions of possibility of experience transcends the experience itself (sect.1), by Husserl these conditions become immanent to the experience itself and therefore knowable by experience (sect.2). This radical mutation introduces an ambivalence in Husserls phenomenology: that between the absolute character of transcendental subjectivity, an idealistic thesis according to which something is an object of the real world only if it is legitimated in the consciousness (sect.3), and the empiricist thesis of identification of the real world with the sensible (sensous contents) (sect.4). This ambivalence is ineliminable, and for this reason the thematization of the object balances between the two distinct philosophical options: idealist-phenomenological and realist-empirical.